Orwell, 1984 and the Ministry

Since the inauguration of President Trump sales
of George Orwell’s 1984 have
increased by 9500%.[1] At
the time of writing it is still at the top of Amazon’s American best seller
list. Its current popularity stems in no small part from the new administration’s
antipathy to the press – “some of the most dishonest human beings on Earth”
according to the President[2]
– and Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway’s use of the term
“alternative facts” in defending an intemperate press briefing by White House
press secretary Sean Spicer. Such phrases appear to have sparked a renewed
interest in Orwell’s book. But what might new readers learn from it?

Written as the wartime Grand Alliance that defeated Germany had long soured, 1984
satirized totalitarian systems of communication and the processes by which
history was rewritten to suit the present. Though Orwell had the Soviet Union
in mind, and a British tendency to ignore Soviet excesses before and during the
war, he drew on his experience of the British Ministry of Information for the
book’s imagery and systems. It was the main inspiration for 1984’s Ministry of Truth.

Orwell never really considered the Ministry
of Information a bad thing. He worked for the BBC between 1941 and 1943,
broadcasting Ministry approved propaganda talks to India, and his wife worked
in the Ministry’s censorship division. Though sometimes frustrated with the
restrictions the work entailed he still firmly believed in its purpose, and
that the Ministry had in fact done a good job during the war. In 1945 he wrote
that “[a]ny fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that
during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome… on the
whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of
minority opinions.”[3] In
his resignation letter to the BBC he made it clear he’d never been asked to say
anything he wouldn’t have done “as a private citizen”.[4]

What troubled Orwell far more was a climate
of opinion in Britain that had gradually smothered dissent over the Soviet
Union, of which Orwell had long been critical. After the German invasion in 1941
which brought the Soviets onto the Allied side, dissenting opinions on Stalin
and the Soviet system were not well tolerated.[5]
What disturbed Orwell most was that publishers, editors and the intelligentsia didn’t
need to be leant on by the Ministry to toe the line – it happened by itself,
since the consensus was to treat all matters involving the Soviets with kid
gloves.

At
any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed
that all right-thinking people will accept without question… Anyone who
challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising
effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair
hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.[6]

The trouble with this passage is that in
today’s context it can apply to both to the right and the left’s view of what’s
become known as the establishment and mainstream media. Those who’ve bought 1984 in the wake of Trump’s victory
might largely be liberals and leftists, but the thoughts that led Orwell to
write it are ones echoed in libertarian media and in the rhetoric of the new
administration and its advisors, which has railed against a perceived consensus.
This can be of little comfort to new readers of the book.

If readers are looking for lessons in 1984 then what can they be? In the book history is a tool of power where the record is constantly rewritten. Inconvenient
facts are erased and new ones are added to suit the purposes of the present. Orwell
had in mind the erasure of Trotsky from Communist accounts of the revolution,
and from Ministry of Information sponsored celebrations of the Red Army and the
Soviets during the war. Given the current alarm over ‘post-truth’ and fake
news, perhaps it is a renewed emphasis on facts and evidence that we can take
from 1984. Several years ago the historian Richard Evans argued in his book
In Defence of History for a forceful
rejection of attempts by postmodern historians to challenge the idea of ‘truth’
in history. Last week Evans linked statements by Conway and Spicer to such
approaches within academia, conflating ‘post-truth’ with postmodern. Whatever
the merits of this rather hostile reading of postmodernism, Evans’ key point –
that facts matter, are discoverable, and are indelible provided we are vigilant
– rings true now. When the White House released a statement commemorating
Holocaust Memorial Day it came in for severe criticism over its failure to
actually mention the Jewish people, eliding all victims of the Nazis and
failing to acknowledge the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy.[7]
What might have been dismissed as clumsiness from another administration was,
in light of enthusiasm among the far right for Trump’s victory, given greater
scrutiny. If 1984 has a lesson for
its new readers, it is to beware of the ‘memory holes’ in a post-truth
age.

Information and its Communication in Wartime

Senate House, University of London25-26 July 2017

We are delighted to announce that registration is now open for this international conference. It will offer to all those attending the chance to listen to 34 presentations on the subject, a keynote lecture (by Professor David Welch ...